²⁰¹¹Jeannette M. Wing

President's Professor of Computer Science and Head, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University

The CRA Board of Directors has selected Jeannette Wing, President’s Professor of Computer Science and Head, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, to receive the 2011 Distinguished Service Award.

Wing was nominated for the award for her national and international thought leadership with respect to Computational Thinking, and for her extraordinary performance as NSF Assistant Director for CISE from 2007‐2010. Articulating the notion of Computational Thinking has been influential in identifying how computing research is indeed far different from computing per se. That is, the way key problems in biology and other sciences, for example–are considered now is in terms of core computational notions such as abstraction, exponentials, and more.

Wing’s leadership at NSF came at a crucial time both scientifically and politically. She has been deeply involved in a set of major NSF programs including Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation, Expeditions in Computing, Trustworthy Computing, Data-Intensive computing, and more. These have helped push research in numerous new directions, and they have been essential in further establishing computing research as a cornerstone of NSF’s full research portfolio and as a critical dimension of America’s innovation economy.  In the words of Peter Lee, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Redmond, “[Simply,] Jeannette’s service work has touched, in a tangible and positive way, virtually every working academic computer science researcher.”